Yet Another Entry in My Series of Poorly-Considered and Ill-Advised Bullet-Point Thoughts

On OS X Lion

I haven’t installed Lion yet owing to an out-of-date backup. I’m waiting on a hard drive from NewEgg before I tempt fate.

Think of the new default scrolling direction as “I want to push the content this way”. It makes more sense.

Many of the transitionary changes in Lion (scrolling direction, dock indicators, scrollbars) all have ways to revert to the functionality of prior OS X releases. This is an odd choice for Apple, as they tend to make changes that they view as improvements, leaving in the dust people used to the legacy methods.

The new login screen is bordering on hideous, but the unlock screen (which uses the user’s desktop picture instead of the ubiquitous linen pattern) is beautiful.

I dislike the new iCal for how horrible the faux leather texture looks, but I dislike Address Book even more. It doesn’t resemble any real address book I’ve ever seen. It’s a usability nightmare. The stack of pages on either side never changes, the hanging bookmark is a button to show groups (as one would, of course, expect), and one can’t actually flip through the “book”.

On Google+

Google+ is an odd rethinking of the typical user privacy model. Usually, person A requests permission to see person B’s information. Person B can accept or deny this request. On Google+, it’s almost the inverse. Person A adds person B to their whitelist, and person B gets a notification that person A is now sharing their content. Person B can choose to share their content with person A or not, but person B can now view person A’s content without requesting it.